‘Because the trees tickled its tummy.’

And then I would slip my small hand proudly into my mother’s as she would laugh, laugh just like I thought the sky had. The way I thought she’d laugh with me forever.

‘I know she killed herself…’ My father’s voice quietened as it always did when he spoke those harsh words, and he paused. He threw the stick for Digby again. ‘But she was in a place she couldn’t get out of at that time. Couldn’t see out of. You were her life – absolutely. You do know that, don’t you?’

This time it was his hand I slipped mine into wordlessly.

Quite soon after that, I decided to call the therapy a day.

I shivered on the bank. Nor was I the person now whom Bel had visited almost every evening in the summer, the person lucky enough to have a friend as patient as her, a very, very good friend who listened as I said I was worried I had lost it. Lost my mind; lost everything.

‘Not me,’ she said brightly, ‘you can’t get rid of me that easily,’ and she painted my toenails scarlet and blue and brought me pictures Hannah had painted of us on vivid yellow beaches with be-hatted suns smiling happily down.

No. I wasn’t that person: I was stronger than that shattered soul. Standing on the side of the bleak dark M4, I pulled my coat tighter round me now. It was time to step forward into something new; time to make peace with my old life and move on with dignity. I could not stay in this ugly place, in this graveyard of a life. I had to accept that Alex and I had long since been over; that though my foot would always be scarred from the crash, it would keep healing until the scar was very faint. That Seb was a nice, attractive man who I still couldn’t quite fathom, and that maybe he would be in my future, but that it wasn’t yet. That right now, I had to think alone and for myself. That, most importantly I still had my dad and Jenny and Gar and Digby, and Bel, despite her being so far away.

I was the person who had parked my car just off Sloane Square a couple of hours ago after leaving Seb in Battersea, and walked into the café with a name like a bird. The person who had ordered coffee and fizzy water and had sat waiting on the terrace.

And as she tripped gaily to the table, thinking this was a social meet, I was the person who looked at her intently and said, ‘So, Fay, what’s this all about?’

‘What do you mean, Maggie?’ she asked lightly, unwrapping her pink pashmina and ordering a white-wine spritzer from a drooling waiter. Such a girlish drink; so apt.